i was really honored to be invited to be here and can't wait to hear what all of you have to say. here's to a successful 2018. [ applause ] >> the u.s. election assistance commission summit continues focusing on a range of election system issues. this hour-long portion included a panel discussion on election efficiency and integrity with nevada's secretary of state, the registrar of voters from san bernardino, california, and m.i.t. science professor charles stewar i want to say thank you to chairman masterson for getting us kicked off here and to doug for the great remarks. as commissioner masterson mentioned the panel that we have here is called "election efficiency and integrity

improving the voter experience," but most of the panel i think will be focused on data and the importance of data and how we use it in the elections community. we've got a great panel here for you. you have biographies in front of you, but my staff has provided some abbreviated biographies which i will read and we will start hearing from the panel. i've asked each to speak for about five minutes or so from their perspective on this panel, and then i have some questions for them and then we will go to questions from you. before get started, though, i want to thank you all for being here. i'm really excited to kick off the 2018 elections. it's hard to believe it's already 2018. we're kicking off the elections, but election officials have already started working on this the day after their last election. i know those of you who are election officials in the

audience, this is not a kickoff for you. as others have said, it's just the kickoff in january, but you all have been working on this election since the last election and appreciate all the hard work that you all put in to making our elections so good in this country. so i will do some brief panel introductions and we'll get going. to my right is secretary barbara sagaski, has served as nevada's secretary of state since 2015. she has more than three decades of combined public service and small business experience. prior to becoming secretary of state she represented clark district 8 in the nevada state senate and before that elected to three consecutive terms representing clarke county district 5 in the nevada assembly. thank you for being here, secretary. to my left, is dr. gaboreits. a senior researcher for the

eac's election administration and voting survey. they did a fantastic job for us this year. make that a public statement. >> thank you. >> that's not an easy task, believe me. for more than a decade, she has worked with a number of private and public partners including the pew chart ibl trusts, voting information project and our friends at the voting assistance program over in the department of defense. thank you for being here. to my far right is michael scarpello. the registrar of voters for san bernardino, california, the largest geographical election jurisdiction in the country. michael has spent more than 18 years working as a director of elections in three states and his expertise is in improving operations, reporting results quickly and accurately and developing innovative programs to assist voters. michael has made his mark at each post in san bernardino county he has made the election

office into an efficient and effective organization and i know that from visiting out there, it's quite an impressive operation, including the launch of new application, a redesign of the county's ballot, consolidation of under used polling places, improved poll worker efforts and much more. we're excited to hear about what you're doing in your office out in san bernardino. to my far left, maybe politically, i don't know, probably of me, i have dr. charles stewart iii, who is the [ inaudible ] am i saying that right -- distinguished professor of political science at the massachusetts institute of technology where he has taught since 1985. his extensive, probably one of the biggest understatements of the day, includes inside looks of congressional politics, elections and important american political developments. those of us in this room have come to rely on charles' to

focus on how administrators can best serve them. i've asked, like i said, each of the panelists to make about a five-minute presentation and i will start on my far right with michael and they all have notes in front of them instead of power points. take it away, michael. >> thank you for allowing me to serve on this panel with such accomplished co-panelists. i got to warn you, i'm an elections geek also, and i can go for hours about this stuff. i know we've got a very short period of time, so i'm going to refer to my notes to keep me on track. the goal of a local election official is to conduct elections in a fair, accurate, accessible, efficient and transparent manner. so meeting that goal is difficult because our budgets are tight, our staffs are small, we rely on temp workers and poll

workers and the expectation is perfection from the media and the public. so that's very difficult. we're constantly thinking about new ways to improve our processes and one of the ways we can do that is to use data. we typically collect raw data, analyze that data and use that data to convert it to information to improve our processes. traditionally, the analysis to prepare that data has been simple. we look at the number of registered voters, we look at the historic turnout, analyze how many locations and ballots and put those com pewtations into law. the issue is many times that those computations are based on averages and averages across the county. averages, that's helpful, but it can be problematic because if we base things on averages, sometimes we underestimate how

much supply we need and sometimes we over estimate and we waste money. in reaction many election officials like myself around the country have spent a lot of time crunching data a lot more to try to be more efficient and in my 18 years in this business i've challenged my staff to crunch their numbers and i always tell them, they should have paid attention in math class. i remind them that everything we do has to be based on numbers. in fact, we believe in it so much that we created an elections analytics department and we have an lexes analyst that does nothing but -- elections analyst that does nothing but develop processes for our different departments. we currently analyze data in every area of our organization and the process kind of guys like this. we collect data -- i'm going to give you an example. i'm sorry. how we look at polling places,

for instance. we collect data about the polling place, find and inspect polling places in quality locations -- i think we're going to talk about that this afternoon in one of the panels -- we inventory the parking spaces, measure the square footage, collect data about voter behavior. we know historically when you look at voter turnout, you look at where people live and we also look at when they vote and we measure when be people vote by the hour. this is something that's kind of unique and i don't think too too many counties do that around the country. we also look at how people vote, do they vote a regular ballot, provisional ballot or just drop off a vote by mail ballot at that location. and then we also predict what -- how the voter will behave on that election day. so we do assimilations. we look at how long it takes a voter to drive to their

location, we look at how long it takes them to park their car, walk into the location, how long it takes to process that voter and then to then vote that ballot for that election. is a long ballot, short ballot and return to their cars. we gather that data and we gather data about our poll worker behavior. how long does it take our poll workers to process a person, how long does it take for a provisional supervisor to process a provisional voter and take all this information and crunch it. we take this data and we calculate the capacity of each of our polling places. we input that and then take that information and put it into gis software and assign people to polling places. because the goal is to keep every polling place busy and be efficient, but not to have any polling place be overwhelmed and have too many voters and then have lines. we also project the number of voters by the hour at each polling place. we use this information to

determine how many supplies we put at every location, how many booths, how many other supplies we need and how many ballots of each time and keep in mind that, you know, people always think of how many ballot, well most election officials it's not just a ballot, it's in our county over 400 different ballot types that we have to distribute throughout our county. we have to calculate the number of each of those types. so it's very complicated. we also assign the number of poll workers based on projections at each polling place and kind of do that for the peak hour. the number of poll workers varies. it's not just three or five at any location. it's five to 18 different poll workers at any given location and we also plan our lunch and dinner breaks around those peak times so we don't have people at break when we have a lot of voters coming. we found that this data analysis is helpful and helped keep things smooth at the polling places, but we also know it's

not always dependable. so we also, in addition to prior to election day, on election day we actually survey each and every one of our polling places to find out what the turnout is like and the ballot usage and then we make corrections as necessary. the result of our data collection and analysis has been that we've created a lot more convenience for our voters. we have very few lines and if there are lines the wait times are very short. we've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and used that money to not just give taxpayers back the money, but to expand our services like increasing our number of early voting sites and our number of mail ballot dropoff locations. this is one example. we conduct similar analysis for early voting for our mail ballot drop-offs and we'll use similar logic in the future as california moves to a vote center model and i will be tapping into amber to look and see what they're doing in colorado to kind of crunch their numbers.

couple of other examples of how we use data. we use it to speed up our ballot counting of our paper ballots. we project drive times to get ballots back and monitor the progress. we analyze the time it takes to process ballots at each step of the way to process them, comp them, to duplicate ballot, to store them, and then we adjust as necessary on election day. we also use numbers to train and assign our poll workers. we have over 3500 poll workers in our county but to get those 3500 poll workers we have to contact over 10,000 people. we have to schedule over 7,000 to come to training and train over 5,000 and we have to assign over 4,000 to get the 3500 to work on election day. we must also recruit and train people in six different languages and place certain people at different precincts. because we're a large area, 20,000 square miles, we train and assign by region and what we

found is that in each region, people behave or are -- their behavior is different. some people are more dependable than others in different regions. we use the information from our analysis to look at that behavior to have different projections in each different type of region so we aren't short of workers at me a particular region. that's a quick look at how we use data. it's helped us and increased our efficiency and made the voter experience better. we pass that information to state and federal officials to compile that data and then we compare our performance against other jur dixships. >> great. thank you so much. there's an unending number of data points you can collect and do things with. it's interesting some of the things you're doing. just incredible. thank you from the local level. we go to the state level.

secretary from nevada, and interested in hearing what you have to say. >> well thank you for having me here today. i want to thank the eac for putting on this summit, christie, for all of your assistance. in the state of nevada we have 17 counties and of those we have 15 that are elected clerks and two voter registrars and we have a very large county in clark, so we understand sometimes the pain that you -- you're going with. one of the things that i wanted to explain to everybody because one of the things that's always unusual for me is to hear acronyms and many of you will hear acronyms and they can mean something different. i want to make sure that you're all aware of some of the acronyms i'll be using to talk about what we're required to do. one of them is the election administration and voting survey that we do get from the eac. it's a biannual survey administered by the eac after

every federal election, which is, of course, every two years, and that data that's collected includes voter turnout, voter registration, pre-election voting, absentee voting and military and overseas voting, polling place, poll workers and provisional voting. we also have what is the vra, which is the voter registration agency, and it's a government agency designated by the federal or state law that is required to offer its customers or clients in most circumstances the opportunity to register to vote. vras include the dmv, public assistance agencies like welfare or employment assistance agencies, agencies that provide service to people with disabilities like aging and disability service division, and military recruitment offices. the next one that you'll hear a little bit about is the cover transactions an every time a customer or a client with with a bra is requesting a service,

filling out a form or application, the vra is required by law to give the person the opportunity to register to vote. these interactions are called covered transactions and two examples for us in nevada that is when you're going in to do anything with your driver's license at the dmv or a person submitting an application for welfare assistance. and then the national voter registration act, the nrva, that is a 1993 federal law, also known as the motor voter law that requires the dmv and public assistance agencies to offer the opportunity to register to vote. so with those, i just wanted to make sure that everybody knows our acronyms. in nevada, we use data to improve the administration of elections and voter experience in several ways. among other things the office of the secretary of state is currently focused on

transactional data to monitor the effectiveness of voter remg stration agencies. we're looking at what they give us to find out if it's accurate and if there is any issues that we might see. we coordinate routine reporting with voter registration agencies and nevada local election officials as well and the voter registration agencies record and report the number of cover transactions, whether the client chooses to register during the cover transaction or if they're going to send it in later or give it to somebody else. those numbers are tracked. we know that they have them and that's where they got that application. the number of voter registration applications each local vra office transmits to the county election office, we also the local officials track and report the number of valid applications received from each voter registration agency as i said and then send that information to the secretary of state's office.

and the secretary of state receives monthly reports from the department of motor vehicles. we get from also the health and human services and these reports are made available on line from the secretary of state nevada at www.nvsos.gov. and we also have a program that monitors data to identify and correct any potential complaint or compliance issues as well as identify best practices. and i'll give you an example. if a significant decrease from previous reporting periods is identified in the number of completed voter registration applications being transmitted from a voter registration agency to a local election office, the secretary of state program staff and the voter registration agency will investigate to determine the cause and whether any corrective action is necessary. we do that on a regular basis between the two agencies. thn we're evaluating the disposition of completed voter

registration applications among offices is another metric program staff uses to identify where review and corrective action might be necessary. an example of that is a local voter registration agency's office that exhibits lower than average completed voter registration applications or rejected applications can indicate potential issues during the covered transaction and the need for vra staff to review training materials. the secretary of state's office puts this data collection into charts and graphs which allows for the review of large amounts of data at a glance and as well as the identification of significant statistical variations. visuals also allow for quick comparison of data over a period of time and other data sets. and the example for this is the department of health and human services reports multiple figures for more than 100

offices on a monthly basis. in the raw data format, interpreting this data can be daunting, but by placing this data in a scatter plot or line graph program staff can easily determine if there's any deviations. and then collecting this data on covered transactions from voter remg stration agencies allows the secretary of state to be proactive during conversations with any of the advocacy groups. and nevada uses voter registration and turnout also to identify best practices at the local levels. so we feel very, very confident in the information that we're getting and being able to work with any of the agencies in nevada to see if we have any issues or where we might need to go in a different direction or look at how we might need to change what we're doing. we look forward to the next

part. >> yeah. i think, you know, both of these little presentations have pointed out, really the goal here is to make the process better for the voter and, you know, serve our tarxpayers as well. we're public servant, at least this side of the aisle is, and, you know, collecting that data makes a big difference on how we can make the voter experience better and more efficient. so from the west side of the country i'm now turning to the other side of the country. the two panelists to my left are both researchers, academics, and interested in hearing what you all have to say on what you've seen with the data and how to make things more efficient and bring more integrity to the voting process.. >> thank you so much for having me today. i'm a senior researcher at the

marsh group. we had the honor of working with eac to administer the 2016 election administration and voting survey. kind of -- i'm happy that i got to follow our election officials because i think these are exemplary of how powerful data can be if used directly to improve our processes and really evaluate whether the policies that we have in place, the processes, and the investments we're making in the election system are having the intended effect. the big challenge that we dealt with as part of the election administration and voting survey, is how can we learn from each other. they talked about elections create so much data and we have great examples of harnessing that data to do one's job better and make sure elections are run well. but i think it's really

important to remember and i am lucky i'm on one of the early panels because i won't be the first to say this, there is no one election in the united states. there are thousands of independent elections run at the state and local levels. they're run with their own policies and their own processes and frankly, in a lot of ways their own vocabulary. when we talk about acronyms and defining them that's really important because without having common definitions of what these data are, and what we can do with them, we really struggle to talk to each other. so the election administration and voting survey for those of you who don't know, it is a large-scale -- the only large-scale data collection process or data collection instrument for administrative collection of data in the u.s. calling it a survey is a misnomer. it's a census of election administration in the united states. covering a variety of topics, registration, turnout, absentee

voting, military and overseas voting, technology and our processes. what's really remarkable, 2004 was the first survey was fielded and it's remarkable to think kind of fundamental questions about elections in the united states, so, for example, how many precincts and polling places are there in the united states, it's mind boggling to think that there was no one place that you could find that information it seemed, so basic and fundamental. the answer to that question for 2016 was there are about 178,000 individual precincts and about 116,000, almost 117,000 individual polling places. additionally about 8500 early voting locations in the u.s. i will caveat and say those numbers are still complicated to interpret, but that's a very important piece of information

that's really shocking that we wouldn't have known that before. i think a couple other highlights that we learned from 2016, there were about -- local election and state officials processed about 77.5 million registration forms. by far the dmv, our department of motor vehicle offices, about a third of them were coming from our dmvs. one change from previous elections was increasing use of on-line voter registration systems, so we had about 17.4% of registration forms coming from on-line systems. that's up from in 2012, it was only about 5%. so big jump there. similarly e-poll books, we saw 75% increase in use of e-poll books since 2012.

2.5 million provisional ballot, half of which came from california, overall about 71% counted in part or full so it's an important way kind of metric to consider how well that protection is working. very active overseas voter population. we saw about 178,000 ballots transmitted to overseas citizen voters, nonmilitary. about 100,000 more than in 2012. almost 80% were returned and ultimately counted. these are important pieces of information about how elections in the united states are doing and again, from all jurisdictions across the country. while these are sort of neat insights, i think what is important to -- what really is important about the eves since it started is that it helped us develop a common language to

talk about elections with, and our secretary from nevada kind of mentioned this, but defining acronyms. without a common definition of these basic terms, what's registration, what do we mean by a rejected ballot or accepted ballot, we really can't -- it becomes difficult to learn from each other and make these comparison. so i think that has been a very important -- it's certainly a work in progress and i think this year the federal voting assistance program through their overseas voting initiative, coordinating with the council of state governments, ran a section b working group and brought together state and local election officials from across the country to talk about the section b which is the military and overseas voter section of the eves to talk about the challenges that they face collecting that data and reporting it and helped refine the definitions. those were lessons we were able to apply across the eves to the other sections. really, when we have this common

language to talk to each other, it really unlocks the possibility of using all the data that get collected or more of the data because it really is copious amounts, in order to report to the eves, not necessarily to do this amazing work of evaluating at an individual level, but to administer elections. this is sort of the tools on the ground that make sure elections are happening. it's exciting, i think there are so many possibilities out there already moving kind of to projects with a common data, data standardization where we're looking at directly from the data that are being collected at a transactional level and how can we take it from multiple jurisdictions. i believe it's 13 involved in that project this year. how can we make these transactional data talk to each other to standardize it in a way

we can gain insight into the election process and improve the election process in the united states. very exciting opportunities in the future and i think the eeve is such an important part of that. >> it does show us the big picture nationwide of how things are going, the successes and the challenges, an down to the smaller levels, smaller jurisdiction levels which are really great and as we continue to work on that with our partners in the federal government and on the ground in the states and local jurisdictions and, of course, our researchers will make it even better. i think it's invaluable information. so with that i will go with -- to dr. stewart. thank you so much for being here again. i'm looking forward to your comments. >> great to be here. thanks again to the eac for inviting me this morning. actually, i want to start with the quip on what christy made in the introduction about our relative political locations.

i think that's actually a good place to start. you know, those of us who are in this business of researching elections and especially trying make them better, talk about making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. i think that's the goal that we all share in -- as we try to make elections better. this movement toward data driven election administration is really an evident to try to understand the degree to which we might have certain values that determine maybe how we think about achieving those goals, but off times, we can decide some of those questions based on the facts. i think that those of white house -- of us who are geeks and all of us on the panel sound like we're geeks, we're driven to see how much we can base our knowledge, our actions on the evidence in front of us. i think there's a lot of success stories that i will talk about in just a little bit in a second

where when we focus on the facts, we can really make a lot of progress. i think that's the important thing here. so the topic, you know, today is, making the voting experience better for voters, making it better for the nation, and i guess the way that i jump into this as an election geek is, thinking back to the year 2000 and the event that got me actively involved in studying election administration and many people around the country interested, at least noticed, that gee, there's something interesting here in the election administration and that, of course, was the florida recount and being a native floridian i was especially -- actually having been registered to vote when i was 18 years old by my second grade sunday schoolteacher i've always been very interested in election administration from a young age. the interesting thing to me as an academic about the florida

recount, once we kind of took a deep breath and tried to figure out what was going on, was to try to understand whether first of all whether what happened in florida was a one off situation or was it common? and then secondly, to try to figure out, really how bad is it after all? i mean, any -- even the best of -- you know, the best of elections from time to time are going to have -- are going to be close, so the fact that you have a recount is not a problem. in fact, that's a good thing to get the answer right. the question is the problems that emerge during the recount are they general or specific to a place and how big are they. it turns out in 2000, there wasn't a good sense about the answers to these questions. is florida one off or not. have these problems persisted for a long time or not. and then, when help america vote

act was passed in 2002, then the question became, okay, we're going to spend a couple billion dollars to make elections better, how will we know if that money was well spent? all of these come down to questions of fact and data. in 2000 it was really interesting to me as a quantitative social scientist that despite all of the data that's generated by elections, very little of it had been used for management purposes and for the purpose of assessing how well the elections were run. so that was one of the things that we did in an organization that i continue to lead called the m.i.t. -- actually it's formally the cal tech/m.i.t. voting project. i like to call it the m.i.t./cal tech voting project. but what we did was we looked around to find ways in which we could use data already being -- already being collected to answer this question, how bad

was it in florida, how does it compare to other states, how, you know, how does it compare to the past? in part we discovered -- i discovered someone named kim brace i discovered, i discovered kim brace, who i saw over here and efs collecting for many years. data about technologies, discovered on the census bureau have been asking questions for many years, we discovered there was a load of data to be used to assess elections and the improvement. we discovered in 2000 when we unmasked this data and look add at it from a perspective of how many lost votes were there? you wake up on election day back in the days when we voted on election day. you wake up intending to vote and you a z a voter do everything right and at the end of the day the vote you cast is

not casted or you are not allowed to vote if there was a screw up in the registration. how many votes was that? that was the problem in the florida recount and what we discovered between one and a half to 2 million votes were lost because of failures in voter machines, poorly maintained machines. up to 2 million voters that day in 100 million. we were able to calculate that one and a half between 3 million people didn't get to vote because of voters registration and then around 1 million people walked away because of long lines and other problems they faced in the polling places and an unknown number at the time problems with absentee ballots which we discovered to be a similar magnitude of the numbers

i mentioned. so millions of people in 2000 and 1996 and 1992 did everything right and didn't have their vote counted. fast forward to the present, had those billions of dollars and other efforts been worthwhile? well it turns out using the same methods, we see that roughly three quarters of those votes that were lost because of voting machine problems have gone away. but half of the voter registration lost votes gone away. about a quarter of the polling place problems have gone away. in other words, we have in the 2016 election, 2012, 2008 and 2004 elections a couple of million more americans had their votes counted because we got

better at running elections and able to document that and that's a valuable thing. both for us to understand how well our democracy runs, to understand that we can make it better and to understand how to use the limited resources that have been mentioned several times to target where to make things better. so as an academic, i'm interesting in these things because i'm curious about everything in a perverse way. the use of a data like this coming from a wide variety of sources can help us pinpoint where problems are and as an aside, oftentimes one discovers there's problems with voting machines or long lines. is this a problem everywhere or a few places? and understanding not only the the magnitude of the problem but where to focus attention is important. it turned out that in 2000

everybody had problems with voting machines. there was one state and i don't want to shame anybody so we'll make up a name and call it smorga had a bigger problem than florida in terms of lost votes and poorly maintained voting machines. they got to the data before we did and they got good at their voting machine management. so targeting and figuring out the problems and going after the problems. back in the simply days of 2012 when we cared about people waiting in line a long time rather than the thing that is came out in the 2016 election. it was a similar thing. well, how bad is the line problem? it turns out that just about every newspaper or news website in america on election day has a picture of a lot of people standing on line to vote at 7:00

in the morning. well, is that generally true or because there is one precinct everywhere and everywhere else is good? how extensive is the problem? where should we concentrate our resources and how will we know when we did better? this is a case where it is not that election officials aregatering data in this area. although in -- first of all assess the problems and address them and make things better in 2016 so in 2012 we were asking voters how long they were waiting to vote, waiting in line and we can discover there were about a half dozen of states where this was a problem statewide. every city in america it was probably a problem that needed to be looked at but a lot of places it was not a problem, it was a one off situation and

those are valuable things to learn. here, we had to create data gathering processes since it is not a common practice or universal practice to count how many people were in line in regular basis and those sorts of things so working with a bipartisan policy center we develop it had protocols for local election officials to start counting up the lines and rely on queueing theory to turn into estimates of line lengths and in 2016 when we went back and asked voters how long they waited in line, the states with long lines in 2012 and i will name them, south carolina, virginia, maryland and florida. their lines were cut in half by three quarters. and part of that, that's a story of a lot of different things going on but part of that was a

story of figuring out ways the instrument and poling places to understand where the problems were because every polling place wasn't a problem child to respond. from my perspective. those of you who have seen my one hour version of my talk, i would start with one of my videos which is by charles and ray emes which we saw in college about the powers of 10 and i used that video to illustrate there's different levels to understand the world one of them being elections. and we can understand what's happening at a state, national and county level and polling places. in order to get elections right in america, we need to understand the levels and what's happening. and i think a comprehensive program of assessing elections in america are looking at all

those levels. the final thing i will say to close up, due to the generosity of the carnegie appropriation, i have a year off to write a book about it and the working sub title well, the working title "voting in america: doing better but feeling worse" and the sub title is to point out that there continues to be a sense that america is in certain places are a banana republic and we can't get it right. i think we are getting better and we do have a positive story and there are challenges. the trick is to measure -- measure whether the challenges are so we can use our limited time and money efficiently to make elections even better and

over come the new challenges that continue to be thrown at us. so thank you. >> thank you dr. stewart i joke about our political positions but the great thing about the elections community is we do come together and focused on the fact and how can we find common ground and make the experience better for the administrators and those reporting on it and the voters. even though we are possibly of different parties all throughout our community we do have the same focus and that is making sure that people get out to vote and their experience is good so they can continue to vote. with that, i'm going to ask a couple of questions of the panel and then we'll go to the audience. we don't have a huge amount of time because those were longer than five minute presentations but worth listening tochlt as we've heard elections do create

a lot of data. and i would like to ask and maybe i'll start on this side, what are the two or three data points or sets of data you think are the most important for voters to understand how elections work? >> well, okay. so i guess i am on this side. we already established that. so when i go around and talk about elections it seems to me that kind of voters don't know the basic contours of how we vote and voters in the west are amazed of how we vote in the east and vice versa. it's a matter of educating voters how we vote, by mail, in person, although, one line of controversy and policy, things like voter id and sorts of things, people don't know what happens in other states and how you register in other states. just basic facts like that.

how do we vote, regulister and w do we check in and do things. the other thing you find interesting, the next fact about the number of precinct. i think it can set some of the context of election. between 100 to 200,000 precincts we have about a million poll workers mobilized on election day and that is a management child and it is the greatest -- democratic mobileization in this country and we fail to really appreciate the size of that effort and the importance of it. and i wish -- that's a fact i wish more voters and policymakers knew. >> dr. gregorowicz. >> unlike our friends on the west coast, we don't get lunch breaks, it's a $50 day.

>> it's all about the lunch break. >> exactly. 41% of people in 2016 voted before election day by mail, early voting and absentee voting. that's important. i think those dynamics are important i agree 100% and data is aggregated up from a poling place and the precinct and county and state level. there is a need for more lo localism, people are interested in how their neighborhood voted or how many turned out. so that is something that i think there is an interest in and is lacking. yeah. >> okay. i'm going to go to something different on this side. you talk about a lot of the data that both of you used to analyze your elections and how things are going and where you need to

fix things, do you also use that data in budget discussions? in resource allocations, things of that nature? >> certainly. i kind of talked about how the county administrators want to save money but what we do is we say we're going to save money here and use it to expand services here. so we certainly do use these analysis to -- in our budget discussions. but i wanted to touch base on the last question, i was anxious to -- if we're talking about -- [ inaudible ] >> the number one way is through our websites so one of the greatest tools ever is google analytics. it is wonderful, back in 2012 we redesigned our website and we thought it was great.

[ inaudible ] >> searching for information that we log in and we fed them the information. so that google analytics helped us educate those voters in a better way. >> you can answer one or both of those questions. >> well, to be honest, yes, data does help us in any budget discussion when we go before the legislature, we bring them examples, our statistics and those are helpful about making new laws and budget as well. i think it is something that we need to point out as well not

only in the voter registration agency. there's a lot more that we can -- [ inaudible ] [ inaudible ]

we do training and we try to -- we have human becomes at the polling places doing the work and sometimes that can be an issue and other times we are happy that they are there and they have the knowledge that they do so it's kind of a mixed bag sometimes. >> other questions from the audience. >> so dr. stewart you mentioned the difference between the qualitative and quantitative. i'd like you to talk about that as it relates to election officials conducting that type

of analysis and mr. scarpello you mentioned -- you collected a lot of data and analyzed it, how would you encourage local election officials to analyze that data? how would they do that? how would they go about in analyzing the data? >> really quickly, well, look, the advantage of quantifying things is that it is an efficient way and mass way to identify problems and moving in a wholesale manner in management. the qualitative data by which i think the question implies talking to people about what is up fills in why it is you might have a problem here or there and certainly, again like any sort of management tool that there's a variety of ways approaching the data are certainly going to

be powerful. i want to hear how they actually got to do this great -- >> and i will say your office is not huge. >> no. >> i think it is smaller than the eac. >> we're probably the smallest election office per capita in the country. we have 28 employees to serve the population of 2 million people in 25 scarquare miles. the important thing is to get buy in and to get education from the election center and the organization and to share information and gather informs from election officials and learn from each other, i think that's the best way to improve and i think we've seen that a lot since 2000. when i got into this business in

2000, i was shocked they were using typewriters and they weren't even using computers. so we've come a long way because people share information. >> do you want to answer any of those. >> i would say i'm on the qualitative end but it's an important question. with all of these jurisdictions throughout the country collecting their data in their own way, i think that is a blind spot a bit that we made some heavy assumptions about what it is the quantitative data we are looking at are. in terms of qualitatively going out and understanding who is inputting data and how these systems are connected or not connected and what really are -- how are they classifying and are dates putting in realistic or thrown into fill a gap at the end?

these are qualitative things that would help on the quantitative end and make better use of the data we have. >> question from the audience? >> yeah. i have a question around early voting and data around early voting. it varies dramatically by state and by how much time is a lotted to a couple of days to multiple weeks at a time. from a jurisdictional perspective or academic national survey perspective. is there any data, the usage -- does it pick back up at election day and does it vary by state as states look to expand or contract the early voting periods to try to see when is, when are voters using it at its

sort of highest usage rate. >> anybody want to jump in on that one? >> if i understand your question right you're talking about the early voting and trends we see from the beginning to the end of that. we see usually you can just stop and you can see who wins and loses in nevada because people come out and vote early. the numbers are very very high and one of the things we see it depends on if it is a weekend or if it is during week when people are coming. you know, because we have the malls, we have now the community centers, but there's that trend of seeing high numbers in the beginning and not so much in the middle and on the weekends it is really big turnout. so it depends on the days and i do think each data is a little

different in the number of days they have for early voting. i don't know if everybody does at this time, but it is popular in nevada. >> people have habits in voting so they get used to voting a certain way. so to change the habits takes time. what we found in colorado years ago we went from one location to 13 locations and that increased. in 2008 we had people voting early as on election day and that concept and expanded it to have early voting all the time. and so we're going through transition in california right now. we are expanding the early voting. it is starting to get on this last presidential year, in our county it exploded and we expect

it to continue to grow. >> quickly, states vary in the data they release and when declined to dig into voting files. i love giving a shot out to south carolina they put all of their data and one of the files i have what they call it is within their absentee file. you can get down to the time of day and all of the early voters from the beginning of the early voting. it's great to learn about these sorts of questions for people who are into crunching numbers. >> i'm really excited about the focus on analytics but wed major polls showing that voters had low confidence in the results of the election and i'm wondering if there's an emphasis to turn that analytic eye of the

counting of the ballots, to count them by hand or releasing digital balancing images to the public so that an analysis can be made of each image. people are lacking in confidence with the measurement and counting of the ballots. i think people would like to see more progress in the ballots. i will take an answer from any of you. >> anybody want to take that on? >> i have one answer. it is an empirical one. to rotate it, one of the things i do is stud a lot on voter confidence and public opinion. and it turns out that first of all voters are confident about the quality of vote counting locally in the state level. they are -- and they are quite skeptical about nationwide.

and that's thing number one. thing number two, the thing that moves voter confidence is whether your candidate wins or loses. there is nothing from all of the studies i have done and my colleagues have done. there is nothing in the election administration that removes voter confidence. having said that, i think there are good reasons for doing audits and other techniques that ensure voters are paying attention and election officials and candidates that the votes were counted properly. it can be -- if one wants to hang reform election administration on voter confidence one may be disappointed. some voters are not basing their confidence in the system. we can tell on the research. >> we don't count ballots on a national level. >> right. >> we just don't.

we have 51 elections in a general election year. so -- >> back to your question your comment about process as well. there's a lack of understanding about this complicated process. >> i would say what you are looking at is a perception problem. rather than changing the process, what we have to do is educate people what we find when we have that candidate that loses, they come in the day after the election and say, this is all crooked. and by the time they walk out 99.9% of the time they are satisfied. it's the same with the public. we need to do a better job with educating the public on the process and if we do, i think we'll have a lot more confidence. >> any other questions from the

audience? yeah? >> how are you guys using data for -- activities if we can talk about that a bit. local and statewide? >> she wanted to know how you use data for list maintenance activity it is. >> michael? >> list maintenance is something that has changed a lot in -- with the help america vote act in 2002 we had over 3,000 county databases and now 50 statewide. and california made this change in 2015-2016 and with a statewide list it is more efficient. we can look at cross county moves and duplicate voters. et cetera. that has come a long way and that's going to expand and hopefully we see a con soshs yum

of counties or states that have put a list together and we see cross state moves and that data will get better and better as the time goes on. >> well being we've come to the end of our discussion here, we could have gone on for longer, as election geeks, that was a fantastic discussion and i want to thank my panelists for generously giving your time to be here and i want to thank all of your the audience for your questions. we'll take a break and reconvene at 11:15. thank you very much. [ applause ]

the senate leaders agreed to a two year federal budget plan and house minority leader says that she and many fellow democrats will oppose a bipartisan budget deal unless the protecting immigrants, the government spending stops at midnight unless a deal is reached. watch live coverage on c-span, c-span 2 and c-span dos organize and the app. a hearing on the -- live coverage begins at 2:30 eastern. and tonight, subcommittee hearing on senior military leader watch at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span.

c-span's history series landmark cases returns this month with a look at 12 new cases. h historians and experts join us behind these decisions beginning monday, february 25th live. 9:00 p.m. eastern. we have a guide written by tony mauro. to get your copy go to c-span dos organize/landmark caseess. >> this portion including keynote